trans_9 | Bendy time to a couple of days after Geartopia Shore Leave

Entry tags:

Bendy time to a couple of days after Geartopia Shore Leave

Sprawled out on her front, right in the middle of the spacewalk, is one Vala Mal Doran. She's booked out a mini-player video thingy from the Media Library and is watching re-runs of 'Dallas' of all things, idly kicking her legs around in the air behind her. Maybe the recent shore leave gave her the taste for cowboy hats as she's still sporting the one that she got on Geartopia, and maybe she thinks it gives her that Pam Ewing look when she's at the ranch.

Vala looks like she was simply lying on any floor. Except because it's the spacewalk, it looks like there's a woman in a cowboy hat and pigtails floating in space. Not your everyday scene, but she's as relaxed as if it were. She's decided she quite likes it here, if she can see the stars then she can imagine being back home and maybe she can fool herself into thinking she's back on the Odyssey on her way to Atlantis. There's also not too many people around - and in particular, no Daniel.

She's been avoiding him ever since the great big shiner popped up on her cheekbone. Somehow she didn't think he'd be particularly impressed if he knew she'd been in a bar fight. So if he saw it then she'd have to make up all these lies about how she got it and maybe it was just best to give him a wide berth instead. That way she didn't have to lie.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

A few days passed before Daniel finally noticed the absence. Of course, he'd been so buried in catching up on the Taleen work that it would've taken nothing short of a Goa'uld bombing strike around him to get him to look up. it finally dawned on him that was the thing tickling at his neck. Peace, quiet, productive and weirdly Vala-free. After all, she'd been all but glued to his hip earlier. Now she was nowhere to be found.

Maybe she was like Menkaure. The (mostly) feral otter tended to vanish for hours on a time, sometimes coming back for food or a pet, or tearing up something that looked a lot like it was from the TARDIS. One day the Doctor was going to come in here and find the nest the otter made of his things, if he wasn't chased off again. There was another possibility: Vala remembered everything that happened the night before. Maybe she didn't want to see him right now. Should he ignore it? Look for her? Or would that push too much?

Daniel suddenly got to his feet and gathered his notes. His back cracked. That was his sign right there to get off his butt and stretch his legs. He didn't pay much attention to where he was going, only that it brought him to what looked like an open airlock into space.

Was that a woman drifting like a board in space? Daniel swiveled to stare. She didn't look...dead or anything. Was she trapped? She didn't look paniced, she looked almsot relaxed. He put one foot out and found that there was a ground. There was also air. The view was beautiful, gorgeous, but also dizzying. Daniel swallowed. And it was a long way down, although there wasn't technically a down in space, that was relative, so he couldn't fall and splat anywhere, but it- Daniel jammed his hands into his pockets and forced himself to take a step before he over thought it much further. It did get easier if he made sure not to look down. Focusing on the view helped a lot. there were so many colors and stars, it was almost mind boggling how small they all were to the rest of the universe. It was beautiful.

A few more steps and he could recognize the profile. He wasn't so sure what to make of the cowboy hat. "I see you found the best part of the ship already."

Underneath the cover of her hat brim, Vala cringed as soon as she heard his voice. Wasn't he supposed to be all busy with his piles of old things? Why was he out taking a merry jaunt around the ship? "Great." Vala muttered under her breath flatly, attempting to pull her hair over the right side of her face. It would have been much easier if she'd been wearing her hair loose, but pigtail removal was too obvious at such short notice and he was nearly on her.

Vala shifted round a bit, angling herself so that her left side faced him. "Daniel!" she said chirpily but sideways on with a smile that was all teeth. "I was just thinking about you, and how busy you must be."

Edited 2011-11-07 02:12 (UTC)

An eyebrow lifted as he looked down at Vala. Then he had to hurriedly look back up, since someone thought it was a good idea to make the floor invisible, and that did hell to the current, ugly feeling of vertigo. Her smile seemed a little forced, all teeth and none of the warmth she'd shown him before.

And if that just now wasn't a barely concealed 'get lost', he'd turn in one of his PhDs.

"I needed some air." Mostly the truth. Not that he missed her hovering or anything, but after the shore leave, things had ended on a weird note. She'd said a lot of things he didn't think she would have under any other circumstances, wildly personal, vulnerable things. He leaned over, peering over her shoulder from where he stood at what was in her hands. "What are you up to?"

That's the problem with being drunk, you tend to do things like that. Although it couldn't be entirely attributed to her blood/alcohol ratio, it was difficult to not think of Daniel as Daniel. As in future Daniel, the Daniel that already knew her. She found it hard to consider the differences. Daniel knew her inside out, except he didn't. That much was obvious by the absence of a pointed suspicious 'Vala' which she absolutely expected to come her way the moment she greeted him with a smile that was just the wrong side of cheery. This lack of distinction, in her mind, was also partly responsible for the fact that she didn't remember everything about the hotel detail for detail. If anything she'd said had been a new revelation then she probably would have done, but it was all old cap-hat-whatever on her side of things.

"Dallas!" Vala offered with enthusiasm, relieved that he was on the right side of her and she didn't need to shift awkwardly. "Immersing myself in your culture." That would please him, she was sure, Daniel was all for culture immersing. "J.R is a complete, well I can't think of the equivalent word in English, but he's not a very nice person at all!"

Edited 2011-11-07 11:51 (UTC)

"...Get into a fight?" Vala seemed awfully relaxed for someone who looked like they'd been on the wrong end of someone's fist. Maybe it was a kind of Geartopian souvenir.

"You can probably get that fixed in Medical, you know. Unless it's a statement or something."

"What precisely would it be a statement of? That I'm a terrible fighter and someone managed to slip me a right hook?" Vala was definitely not the type to wear battle scars as trophies. She preferred actual trophies, preferably made of gold and encrusted with jewels.

As for the Medical department, she thinks not. She had a bad experience with 'doctors' right before she arrived on Stacy. "I'll pass thank you, it's only a bruise."

"What happened to being a weapons expert?" Zouichi rarely stayed damaged long enough to make a statement.

"Not a fan of Medical? And after all that work we did trying to steal that medical technology. Well, I guess they do tend to poke and prod."

"Well I'm not actually a terrible fighter," Vala rolled her eyes, her sarcasm was lost it seemed. "Besides, you should have seen the others," she added smugly. By some stroke of luck she'd managed to come out of the fight victorious.

"What kind of medical technology?" Not that she needed it for a bruise nor was she willing to let anyone prod or poke with her with anything, least of all people she didn't know. But she was curious none-the-less.

Perhaps they'd find a codex somewhere with which to decipher each other's senses of humor. Zouichi raised an eyebrow at her, crossing his arms. "Oh? And how many broken, prone bodies did you leave in your wake?"

"And the kind of medical technology that would allow crew members to regenerate limbs and come back from near death. Supposedly. Although if you ask me, it was more trouble than it was worth."

Dallas. Never heard of it. But from what Daniel could see of the screen, it looked old. He leaned in closer. Not a movie and not something more recent. Probably a comedy or soap opera? If that was the case, he hadn't missed out. Whatever it was, it didn't look like something he'd pictured as Vala's type of show. Or maybe, looking at her hat, it was.

"I'm not quite sure that's what anyone means by culture," Daniel certainly wouldn't have used it as a good example of Earth entertainment. Or anything indicative of Earth storytelling to an offworlder. "Who's JR?"

"At least four, that's if you count dazed, confused and wondering where I went, otherwise three." Or maybe it was two, Vala tilted her head from side to side as she did a quick tally up. Just don't ask Jamie because he'd probably disagree.

The regenerating limbs part was new to her but not the bring people back from the brink technology, Daniel had one of them in the lab if it wasn't jammed and inoperable. "You see this is the kind of background info I need, before Stacy decides to send me off on a wild duck chase. What happened?"

To be fair it had been the first thing that had popped up in the category, and it was a show that one of the customers at Sol's Diner had mentioned a few times, so she was curious enough to pick it. The hat was mostly for the fact it had a wide brim and did quite a good job at hiding her face if she tilted it forwards, which she did as Daniel leaned over for a better look.

"Oh." Well that was a disappointment, she was hoping to score points here and so far she'd been thoroughly enjoying it only to have Daniel dismiss it. There was nothing like Earth soap operas in her world and she'd found the less believable they were and the more plot twists there were, the more she revelled in it. "Well he's a rich oil baron and the eldest son of--I forget her name, but his wife is Sue Ellen and she's an alcoholic and he has enemies around every corner and--" Vala stopped herself, wondering if he was remotely interested.

"Well I like it," she said defensively.

Edited 2011-11-08 01:46 (UTC)

Daniel tried to listen. He did. His eyes just started to glaze over at 'rich oil baron', and by then, his attention was shot. At least what Sam talked about most of the time was more of a brain stimulator, even if most of her hard astrophysics went over his head. He couldn't find it in him to drum up the interest to find out what happened to Sue the Alcoholic and JR the Oil Baron.

His complete lack of interest must've showed on his face. Possibly the blank stare. Or the way his gaze started to float back to the far more interesting corridor. It was the look Daniel tended to get when he found himself wishing he could go back to his artifacts instead, usually when faced with the prospective of a long briefing or having to put on an appearance at hearing just for the sake of politics.

"You like what you like," Daniel was the very image of diplomacy.

Vala on the other hand wasn't the slightest bit diplomatic and when she saw an opportunity, especially one that served her purpose so conveniently, she took it.

"Precisely. So if there's nothing of any further interest here, I wouldn't want to be held responsible for keeping you from your mountains of work. I'm sure broken artifacts are infinitely more fascinating to an archeologist of your intellectual calibre than old soap operas."

Not once did she look up at him or turn to face him properly, she managed the entire conversation by simply glancing sideways at him.

"I'd count that as a pretty solid win."

He frowned a little, considering. Wild duck chase? He'd never heard that one before. "The ship gathered about thirty of us on the Obs Deck, and told us we'd be negotiating with the leaders of a planet for some sort of advanced medical technology. What that technology was, exactly, the ship didn't say. Nor did it particularly go into details about the customs of the planet, or the nature of the so-called dissident societal faction the leaders wanted us to help deal with in exchange for access to their equipment."

"It turned out the planet was run on slave labor performed by a short-lived clone caste, the leaders wanted us to put down an insurrection made up of clones who didn't want to live out their lives as beasts of burden, and the administration wanted to use our genetic information to build a clone army for itself." That was the story in very condensed form, anyway.

Now even he was getting suspicious here. One moment, Vala's asking him to be there for her, now she couldn't wait to get rid of him, much less actually look at him. He could chalk up the way she felt him up with her eyes to intoxication, but before that, she'd generally had no problems looking at him. Daniel could only frown at her, at the device in her hands that had the woman glued to it. It couldn't be that fascinating that it required her whole attention.

And if it was, some part of him was deeply offended that a second rate soap opera was more interesting than he was. Daniel, deliberately oblivious, let the more blunt signal to leave fly over his head.

"I needed a break. It's not going anywhere. Actually..." Daniel pretended to suddenly remember. He tapped his chin. "I wanted to talk to you about the last shore leave."

Edited 2011-11-08 02:42 (UTC)

"Which is fortunate really, as I suspect they wouldn't have been content to simply floor me."

Geese, ducks, poultry in general - did it matter which one? Sometimes she gets phrases wrong, it's what comes of working in an environment where people use these silly idioms all the time, especially Cam. There's just too many to grasp them all perfectly.

Vala listened intently, taking it all in, perhaps for the first time actually belying her true intelligence to Zouichi. "Whilst I appreciate Stacy is sentient, even she can't be omnipotent, surely. At least I assume so anyway. Had it not been for the underhanded tactics from the administration of the planet, then the technology was probably worth acquiring. Still, genetically manipulated clones of the crew as slave labor. I can't imagine you were too pleased at having to negotiate your way out of that one."

Edited 2011-11-08 02:49 (UTC)

Zouichi smiled wryly. "No, not omnipotent, although it certainly seems to have no compunctions about rooting around in the crew's brains. However, basic information about the planet's customs and government was widely available to all outside visitors. 'All' being the operative word. The ship could have easily obtained that information and passed it along to us; in fact, I find it hard to believe it knew where to take us and for what without having any inkling as to how dangerous the situation was. And it's not exactly the first time we've been shuttled off somewhere with barely a warning about what might be waiting for us."

"We didn't exactly negotiate our way out of anything. The government attacked us, sent our preprogrammed clones out to kill us... we ended up stealing odd bits of technology instead of organizing a trade. Oh, and they tried killing us with explosives planted in our hotel rooms. That was fun."

Vala actually sighed, closing her eyes as she did in exasperation. Couldn't he take a hint? She hadn't gone out of her way to make it subtle. Quite the reverse in fact. She thought she'd made it crystal clear that she didn't want him around.

"Shore Leave." That was a pretty big subject, whatever he wanted to discuss it wasn't going to be over in a matter of minutes. "What about it?" She paused the video player in her hand with some irritation. Obvious irritation.

"You do realise I think J.R is about to get shot?"

Edited 2011-11-08 03:05 (UTC)

Oh come on, the show wasn't that interesting! "And you do realize you have a pause button."

Giving him five minutes of her time wasn't nearly the chore she made it out to be. The look on his face could only be defined as either dumbfounded or steadily annoyed. It wasn't like he was about to debrief her on the significance of runes recently found on a set of ruins SG-4 stumbled across.

"Yes, about the night you came into my room," he clarified. Not the day of, not the morning after, he wanted to talk about that night. "You asked something of me. I'd like to know what you meant."

Edited 2011-11-08 04:33 (UTC)

"Well it wasn't accidental that I just pressed it." Vala flashed him the paused screen as evidence that she was indeed aware, petulant sarcasm not withheld. Look, there, see, already done it.

She asked him something? What had she asked him? Oh that... the entire reason she was laying low given why she'd got into a bar fight. The momentary confusion followed up by that sinking look on her face was all more then evident. If she hadn't pulled the hat brim forwards another inch or two and completely obscured her sizeable purple souvenir that is. Enjoy your conversation with a brown suede hat, Daniel.

"You'll have to jog my memory," she floundered, buying time.

Edited 2011-11-08 08:31 (UTC)

He jumped on the slip immediately. "Exactly, there you go. You're not going to miss anything."

Daniel saw it across her face the moment the hazy memory of the night in question returned to her. And if that wasn't enough to implicate her, Vala making the sudden decision that her hat was just as good as any fortress kind of sealed her fate.

Biting his lip, Daniel considered the hat wall. "You know what I'm talking about." What he didn't see the point of was Vala lying about it. They both knew she remembered enough. She might as well save herself the trouble. Them she could get back to her "cultural immersion". He crouched at her side, a sure sign he wasn't going anywhere else fast now. Cocking his head, he tried to peer under the brim.

"Can we please talk about this like adults?"

Edited 2011-11-08 10:22 (UTC)

Vala pursed her lips, tapping the screen with a finger thoughtfully as he hunkered down to speak to her at her level. She turned her head away from him, his perfectly reasonable request breaking through her resolve. He always had this way of pushing until she couldn't keep it up any longer.

Resignedly she removed the hat and faced him properly. There was no use in trying to hide it anymore, he was going to notice it sooner or later and she might as well be the one to relent.

Besides, lying was still an option. Vala smiled at him guiltily, her eyelid was an interesting marbled effect of purples and yellows, her purple cheekbone outlined with orange definitely larger on that side of her face and her eye didn't quite open all the way. All in all it was a bit of a mess.

"You're right. Of course we can."

Edited 2011-11-08 10:38 (UTC)

Precisely the reason Vala's thus far avoided the Sensoriums, she's more than wary of the fact there needs to be a telepathic link of sorts to make them work. There were far too many worrying things in what Zouichi just said. So for now she'll stick to the one that concerns her most, especially given her recent painful mind probing experiences back in Colorado.

"I'll bet," was the only comment she made regarding the events of the mission, it was no more risky than a lot of her life had been after all. Not that she was trivializing it, not by any stretch.

"How--how exactly does the ship extract information from the crew's minds?" Vala didn't bother to hide her concern, and if Zouichi was adept at reading tells, there was a hint of thinly veiled fear masked under there.

Well, Vala wasn't exactly the first person on the ship to be uncomfortable with the idea of an alien intelligence probing her thoughts without permission. Besides, it was a little too early to pry into that sort of thing.

"The ship is telepathic. I'm sure you've heard of the Sensoriums already -- it uses a mental link to create the illusion of objects, animals, scenery. It can speak inside our minds, as I'm sure you've already noticed. And interestingly enough, it seems to interfere with the abilities of psychic crew members. Especially when it comes to inquiries directed at the nature of the ship itself."

He paused. "If you're worried about it getting into your thoughts, I'd say it it's most likely too late for that. But if it helps, I'm sure everyone on the ship is subject to some scrutiny. It's not like it doesn't watch us constantly, anyway." Zouichi wasn't a big fan of the ship.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Page 1 of 4

Bendy time to a couple of days after Geartopia Shore Leave

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject